Why one signal never tells the whole story
In late July 2025, the Commonwealth Bank announced it would cut 45 call centre jobs after rolling out an AI voice-bot, confident it would make the bank more efficient.
By 21 August, just three weeks later, they had to reverse the decision. Calls were rising, customers were frustrated, and the promised savings had already disappeared.
This is not about whether AI will deliver on what people believe it promises. It is about how leaders, when faced with uncertainty, can grab onto one signal that feels reassuring and treat it as if it explains the whole story.
Steven Weber, in the article Scenario Planning Amid Radical Uncertainty, describes the pattern. When the future is uncertain, we can tend to grab onto and magnify what looks like a single compelling report, or magnify remarks from a respected commentator.
Doing so, soothes the discomfort of not knowing, but it creates a false sense of certainty that does not last.
Ambiguity at the heart of leadership choices
The cost of this shows up across industries. A 2024 paper in Financial Markets, Institutions and Risks links over-reliance on short term signals to scandals, losses, reputational damage, and weakened innovation, using cases such as Boeing, GE and many others to illustrate how this plays out over time.
The late James March of Stanford University said:
“Most of what we call ‘decisions’ are really interpretations of ambiguity.”
— James March
It’s a trap that shows up all the time. An economist says inflation will peak by Christmas. A consultant claims AI will take 40 per cent of jobs.
These sound like answers, but if leaders act on them in isolation, they risk exhausting their people and wasting resources on the wrong bets.
I liken it to weather forecasts. On Sunday, the seven-day outlook promises sunshine all week. By Wednesday, the same forecast shows storms. Yet leaders often take the first forecast as fact, and lock in their plans.
Leadership that holds in times of change
The alternative is not to ignore signals, but to treat them as provisional. Rather than clinging to a single reassuring signal, leaders can foster resilience by embracing practices that help them navigate ambiguity in real time:
- Build dynamic scenario maps. Hold several plausible futures at once, update them often, and make peace with the fact that you are managing possibilities, not certainties.
- Synthesise, do not silo. Place each new data point in a series. Ask what it might connect to that looks unrelated at first glance.
- Invite alternate perspectives. Bring in people who see it differently. The goal is not consensus, it is a truer picture.
- Lead using the Centring Star. Use Intellectual Flexibility to keep multiple explanations open as you learn, use Contextual Wisdom to notice when conditions shift and what that means for timing and risk.
- Make the next right move, small. When a move looks promising, run a safe to try experiment to check whether what you think will happen, happens, before you put your whole team on the hook.
When everything is changing, leadership that holds means staying flexible and open, not getting stuck on one “right” answer.
If you help your team adapt, learn together, and face uncertainty side by side, you’ll build the kind of trust and strength that lasts—no matter what comes next.
